1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the control of a mobile body, such as a security robot having a home base, a helper robot, or a cleaning robot, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for correcting location information of a mobile body, and a computer-readable media storing a computer program for controlling the apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In conventional methods for controlling a mobile body, it is impossible to accurately detect the location of the mobile body. One of such conventional methods is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,532,404 entitled “Mobile Robots and their Control System.” This conventional method has a problem in that it is impossible to detect the location of a robot although it is possible to make the robot return to a home base. Another conventional method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,781,338 B2 entitled “Method and System for Robot Localization and Confinement.” This conventional method also has a problem in that it is impossible to detect the location of a robot although it is possible to set a range within which the robot moves. A conventional method capable of approximately detecting the location of a robot is disclosed in Korean Patent Application No. 2003-0000597 entitled “Auto Charge Return Apparatus and Method of Robot Cleaner.” In this conventional method, a robot can receive an infrared ray only when the robot faces a charger and approximately sense the location of the charger, but cannot accurately know its location.
Meanwhile, there is a dead reckoning system among the conventional methods in which the moving distances of left and right wheels of a robot are individually measured and a location and an azimuth angle of the robot are measured using the individually measured distances. A conventional dead reckoning system is disclosed in the introductory part of the paper by J. Borenstein, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Diego, Calif., May 8-13, 1994, entitled “The CLAPPER: A Dual-drive Mobile Robot With Internal Correction of Dead-Reckoning Errors.” However, since the dead reckoning system has a problem of accumulating errors of the location and azimuth angle of the robot, a limitation exists in detecting the location and azimuth angle of the robot using only this system.